Expert: Matt Dick - 8/14/2010

Question
I made some beer (I thought it was anyway )a long time ago with just water , yeast and sugar. Is this possible? A old timer showed be how to do this and poor old man is dead !So I cannot ask him. I made like 5 or 10 gals at a time you just had to let it set for about 30 days.It was good at the time. Can you please help me? I have searched the web over and have not found the answer I am looking for. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME

Answer
My apologies, I've been on vacation and only just got back yesterday.

The answer is that you can make an alcoholic beverage, but I'd hesitate to call it beer.  Here's a little information that may help:

Yeast is what makes the alcohol that we drink.  It metabolizes sugar and gives off carbon dioxide and ethanol.  One way to think about alcoholic beverages as a large group is to consider the kind of sugar the yeast is metabolizing.  Beer is made when yeast eats the malt of a grain and gives off the ethanol and carbon dioxide in the presence of hops (a preservative, bitter flower).  Water is always present for yeast to be active.  You do this with a tight cap on during some stage of the fermentation and the carbon dioxide that is given off gets highly pressurized and is forced into suspension in the drink (hence is "carbonated").

Wine is very similar, eliminating the hops and using grapes instead of malted grain.  Mead is the same but with honey.  Some drinks use adjuncts and additives at times, but these are the basics.

For spirits you could break them down the same way, although after fermentation the resulting liquid is distilled to remove a tremendous amount of the water and solids.  But again, the kind sugar is key.  Tequila is sugars from the agave cactus, whiskeys are also from malted grain, vodka is purified, so you can get it from almost anything, but I think it was from potatoes originally.  Rum is from cane sugar.

So you will have created an alcoholic beverage from yeast, sugar and water, but it would not be beer (or wine or mead, or anything in particular).  I would imagine it would taste terrible.  If you're going to the trouble, check out a recipe from one of the easy-to-obtain brewing books and make a tasty beer instead.

Good luck.